Gabriela Lopez Forte walks her five-year-old daughter to school everyday, passing small parks
and tightly packed Victorian-style homes as she navigates narrow tree-lined streets. The Lopez
Forte family’s Cornell Park Avenue home in Markham, Ontario lies at the heart of an urban-planning
Petri dish that seeks to redefine the suburbs and breed a culture of sustainability.

As baby-boomers become empty-nesters and their children enter the housing market themselves,
both generations are increasingly heading back to the cities and leaving suburbia behind.

So, is there a future for the communities that author James Howard Kunstler deems to be "the
greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world?" It’s people like
Lopez Forte and communities like Cornell that are keeping the country’s suburbs and smaller
cities on life support — proving there are ways to retrofit suburbia to become more sustainable
and more attractive to people of all ages and economic situations.

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Granted, not all communities afford the same redevelopment opportunities as
others, but new urban-design principles may soon be coming to a town near you.
New urbanism is an increasingly trendy planning concept that seeks to recreate
the pedestrian-friendly and high-density cities of the 19th and 20th centuries.

One might even call it a 'back-to-the-future’ approach to urban design.

"A typical suburb has all the ingredients
of a salad, but everything is in separate bowls at each corner of the
table. What we have tried to do is toss it all back together."

—George Dark, Urban Strategies

In Cornell, garages are located in laneways behind single and multi-family
homes, while grid-like street patterns were chosen in favour of confusing networks
of windy roads. George Dark, managing partner with Toronto’s Urban Strategies,
has worked on Cornell’s open space design for over a decade and stresses
the importance of designing a neighbourhood where people can walk to nearby schools,
stores, community centres and parks.

"If you think of an urban city as a salad, all the ingredients are present
and mixed up in one bowl," he explains. "A typical suburb, on the other
hand, has all the ingredients of a salad, but everything is in separate bowls
at each corner of the table. What we have tried to do is toss it all back together."

"What to do with existing suburban communities — now
that’s the $65,000-dollar question."

—Dan Leeming, Planning Partnership

And a new ingredient will soon be added to the mix — Markham Centre, an
area planned to be Markham’s new downtown core. It represents yet another
dose of new urbanism in the area.

David Clark, an architect for the Town of Markham and part of the senior management
team responsible for the Markham Centre project, hopes this development will
illustrate the possibility of growing outward in a sensible way by intensifying
within an urban boundary. "By intensifying inside the urban envelope, it
puts less pressure on the need for outward expansion and the growth of the community
can be better managed," says Clark. The downtown core is being planned to
house over 35,000 people, one high school, four elementary schools, 20-25 hectares
of park and open space, 30 hectares of protected open space in the Rouge Valley
area and about 17,000 new jobs.

When all is said and done, it seems that Markham residents will be able to have
their cake and eat it too, living in a town on the outskirts of a mega-metropolis,
all-the-while swapping car keys for walking shoes when the milk-jug is empty
or it’s time for school. But as more and more people opt for the city centre
and new communities like Cornell or Markham Centre, what will happen to the suburbs
that don’t easily lend themselves to urbanization?

Even with the issue of private property ownership aside, Clark agrees that it’s
very difficult to urbanize already established suburbs and smaller cities simply
because of the way the streets and lots were originally designed.

But John Norquist of the Congress for the New Urbanism, an urban planning organization
based in Chicago, Illinois, holds out hope that there is a way to bring urbanism
out to suburbs that don’t easily lend themselves to infill.

"People will likely want to live in suburbs
well into the future, even in the midst of what’s happening within
the oil industry."

—Jill Grant, Dalhousie University

"There must be some way to pierce the world of the cul-de-sacs with new streets and pathways
in order to make them more navigable and pedestrian-friendly," he says. Lago Lindo, a
community of about 5,000 people in the northern edge of Edmonton, is trying to do just that.
Currently, there is a request before city hall calling for the installation of a mini-traffic
circle midway through the community which would slow traffic and make the area more pedestrian-friendly.
There has also been talk about adding paved paths in order to connect the community’s
two schools.

But other than rendering the community more walkable or developing it from
the ground up on open land - as was the case in both Cornell and Markham Centre - urban
planners like Dark say some of the best opportunities for infusing new urbanism
into suburbs come in the form of greyfields. Greyfields are developed sites
that are economically and physically ripe for major redevelopment.

For example, a failed shopping mall has the potential to be transformed into
multi-family dwellings with retail and employment opportunities located on
the ground level. But Jill Grant, a professor in the School of Planning at
Dalhousie University, says it’s important to remember that suburban life
is still desirable for a lot of people.

"People will likely want to live in suburbs well into the future, even
in the midst of what’s happening within the oil industry," she explains. "Prices
of oil may well go up and while a lot of literature seems to assume that people
will move to the city for work, maybe industry will move out to the people."

In the meantime, new urbanism will continue to be infused into smaller cities
as well as new and existing suburbs such as McKenzie Towne in Calgary’s
southeast corner, East Clayton in the eastern part of Surrey and Oak Park Community
in Oakville.

But while professors, urban planners and governments are trying to determine
the fate of many of the country’s suburbs and smaller cities, people
like Gabriela Lopez Forte won’t be biting their nails in suspense. Instead,
they’ll be enjoying daily strolls on the sidewalks of their new urban
neighbourhoods.